Finding Value in Unexpected Places

One of the first lessons Joe Rantz had to learn as an abandoned child was how to survive. He grew up in Depression-era America, where everyone was foraging for survival. Families were barely scraping by and as a result, had nothing to hand out to those less fortunate than them. Joe was forced to think outside the box if he wanted to survive in such a hostile environment, and he found a way by looking at the world a bit differently than his neighbors: “If you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something valuable in the most unlikely of places. The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away and leave it behind” (Page 37). Joe first made...